RE: Hacking a Commodore PC10-III

Commodore's PC's were very good, not spectacular by any means but very
compatible and of a high build quality. I still have a few (including two
laptops) - all work perfectly even now. Solid and reliable machines.

On Wed, Oct 19th, 2011 at 8:36 AM, Didier Derny <didier@aida.org> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> Frankly I would have a terrible pleasure to drop a commodore pc 
> In an active volcano ....
> 
> Commodore and PC ... contradiction the terms...
> 
> Hopefully I stopped working on commodore before I saw this error... euh
> horror...
> 
> Lol have fun :=)
> 
> --
> didier
> 
> 
> -----Message d'origine-----
> De : owner-cbm-hackers@musoftware.de
> [mailto:owner-cbm-hackers@musoftware.de] De la part de Ruud@Baltissen.org
> Envoyé : mardi 18 octobre 2011 21:33
> À : cbm-hackers@musoftware.de
> Objet : Hacking a Commodore PC10-III
> 
> Hallo allemaal,
> 
> 
> Most of the time we are talking about hacking the C64, PET, CBM, 
> etc. with as latest "victim" the Plus/4. To be very honest, after 
> twenty years of 6502 I was a bit fed up with all the 6502 related 
> stuff. And having various Commodore PC's on the shelf doing nothing 
> at all, I decided to give them a bit more of attention. For 
> example, I wanted to find a better replacement for onboard harddisk 
> than the old 20 MB MFM I had. Indeed "had" because it just died two 
> days ago. So I started to disassemble the BIOSes of the PC 10/20-
> III and the PC-1
> 
> By accident I could lay my hands on a XT-IDE card:
> http://n8vem-sbc.pbworks.com/w/browse/#view=ViewFolder&param=XT-IDE
> I equiped it with the XTIDE universal BIOS:
> http://code.google.com/p/xtideuniversalbios/ 
> After some puzzling I was able to replace the original code for the 
> unusable 8 bits IDE harddisk with the above one. Advantage: now I 
> can solder the relative simple IO interface W/O the need for the 
> onboard ROM.
> 
> I attached a 2.5 GB HD and installed MS-DOS 5. FYI: I chose the 2.5 
> GB one for the simple reason it made the lessest noise of all 
> harddisks I have. MS-DOS 5 supports UMB (= upper memory block), 
> memory between the "famous" 640 KB limit and the maximum of 1 MB. 
> Something the PC 10-III doesn't have so I added an old IBM memory 
> expansion card, adding 64 KB in the 0Exxxx area. 
> But this memory needs to be initialised as well. So I added the 
> needed routines to the BIOS as well. 
> 
> Now I have to install my 23 years old UMB software and see if 
> things work out fine. I have no doubt here as I have done this 20 
> years ago as well but with an IBM AT.
> 
> Next steps: replace the 8088 with a NEC V20 and installing a 8087. 
> And maybe a VGA card, less original but the original IBM CGA screen 
> weights about a ton :(
> 
> If interested, all sources are free!
> 
> 
> Next project: doing the same for my PC-1, just for fun! And then 
> I'm going to pay attention to my just bought CMD hard disk, which 
> is 6502 again :).
> 
> 
> --
>     ___
>    / __|__
>   / /  |_/     Groetjes, Ruud Baltissen
>   \ \__|_\
>    \___|       http://Ruud.C64.org
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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> 
> 
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> 




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